Touch The Sky
by Feonyx
Summary: After the final battles in Ambervale, Ritz has joined Marche's clan. She's not having such a great time fitting in or matching reality with what she imagined, and everyone's getting a bit fed up... so how is a mission to a giant tree going to help?


**Touch The Sky**

"This combines intolerable and incomprehensible with the sort of artistry that a master chef would be thrilled to achieve," said Ritz. She had been doing that a lot over the last two days. As much as Marche valued her as a friend, he was beginning to think it would be simpler to knock her out and let Matias carry her the rest of the way.

"It's a job like any other," said Elena pragmatically. "And don't you just love being out here in the open fields, with the winds rolling the grass and the entire sky a panorama of light and shadows, painted in clouds?"

"No, I really don't," said Ritz. "Not while we're on some psycho mission with no point. Do they even have trees in Aisenfield?"

The other five members of the clan's chosen battle party looked around with generic helpfulness. Several trees were in view, solitary sentinels across the hill-rippled plains or clustered around streams. "Yes," Marche reported, with the authority of a clan leader.

"You're so funny," Ritz said, managing only by great effort of restraint not to spray sarcasm all over her companions.

"You know," Matias said quietly to Montblanc, "in ssome traditional bangaa culturess it would be allowable for uss to eat her now."

"I don't think Marche would like that, kupo."

"It iss preferable to a sslow death by rantingss."

They reached a hill slightly higher than all the others around it, with a wide, flat summit. There wasn't much shelter in the surrounding plain, which would make it hard for anything to sneak up on the group. "I think this could make a good campsite for the night. According to our employer–"

"Professor Flaky MacFruitcake," Ritz interjected less than quietly.

"–we should be getting close to our destination. What do you say we take a break and finish this mission up tomorrow morning?" Marche suggested.

The four non-humans of the group put this through a silent committee. "Sure," Elena agreed, and at no opposition, they started building camp. All of Marche's clan were long veterans of tent-raising, fire-constructing, and the dozen discipline of hunter-gathering, so they had a little habitation up by the time the sun was only nearing the horizon. Most of the sky began to tint purple, with an orange horizon and a shade of pink in-between that defied the laws of both nature and Ivalice.

"…Oh, blast. I forgot the tinder set," Leif, a nu mou, grumbled as he searched his bag.

"It'ss right here," said Matias.

"Really?" he asked gratefully. "Perhaps I have been misjudging bangaa as an overly spontaneous people, not caring to plan for–"

Matias tilted back his head and let loose a blast of flames that made the air waver with heat. "Dragoonss _are_ a tinder set," he said, grinning as smoke trailed from his nose.

"…Well, let's find some wood, then," Leif suggested, his voice higher than usual.

Marche looked over these few of his clan, of which only Montblanc had long been a member, and found their camaraderie to be Good. Bangaa hardly got along with anyone, but here Matias was having fun with a scholarly nu mou, and, as far as Marche was aware, hadn't threatened to eat anyone on their entire journey.

Montblanc and Elena seemed to have taken it upon themselves to supply the party with food for the evening, and that left precisely one person left over. Not that Ritz wanted to be part of either of those groups, or apparently had any interest in the entire clan. She was on another nearby hill, silhouetted nicely against the low sun, practicing her fencing.

As Marche approached, Ritz twirled and parried an invisible attacker, ran through another one, and fended off the next with a rush of quick feints and deflections that no ordinary warrior would be able to cope with. The rapid pivoting of her routine reminded Marche of the viera martial arts forms, and he wondered just how much time she had spent with that people since they came to Ivalice.

Turn, thrust, hold guard, feint, offer, deflect, disarm, thrust again – there was an instinctive side to her motions, too, and when he was close enough to see that her eyes were shut, he realised that Ritz was making up and fighting an imagined battle all at once. "I'd get closer, but you'd filet me," he said.

Ritz paused, opened her eyes long enough to confirm that it was Marche, and returned to practice, but her motions were slower now and more methodical. She had returned to the standard pattern of moves, maybe feeling that her improvised skirmishes weren't something to be shared with others.

"That's probably just as well," Ritz agreed.

"You don't want company," he observed.

"That's right."

"Having complained about the sheer boredom and plainness of the plains for the last couple of days, now you're trying to get away from people who want to be your friends," he went on.

"What can I say?" she asked, too flatly to count as a question. "I'm unpredictable."

The _clang_ of her rapier clashing with Marche's sword shook Ritz out of her methodical battle-trance. She glared at Marche, who matched her glare and returned it twofold, his sword completely unmoving. "What the hell, Ritz? I thought you joined the clan because you wanted to be one of us!" Even raised, Marche's voice was even and reasonable, something he had found could infuriate his tougher opponents. It turned out to work well on Ritz, too.

"And _I_ thought I was joining a band of legendary adventurers!" she countered, rather more hotly.

"…What?"

"I thought that the stories were true, all right? That you travelled across the whole country, slew vampires and tamed dragons and investigated ancient temples and prevented huge disasters! I thought that your clan would be someplace worthwhile, but like everything else it's been a disappointment. It's like any other clan," she said, a drawn-out melancholy growl.

"…We did do all those things," Marche insisted.

"Oh, is that the problem? I just got here _after_ the fun stuff was done?"

"You've only been with us for a couple of weeks. How often do you think the kingdom is thrown into unspeakable peril?"

"Seemed to be every other day, until all that trouble in Ambervale," said Ritz. "Yeah, yeah, I know you cleared a lot up when you got rid of Mewt's fake queen-mom and all. There haven't been any massed attacks by swarms of monsters from nowhere. Do we even know what Ivalice is, now?"

"I'm not bothering wondering about that. We'll probably get hired to figure it out soon enough anyway, if Babus is as curious as the rest of us. …Hey, don't change the subject!"

"Can't blame me for trying," Ritz remarked, turning to fence again.

"Are you going to be part of this clan or not? Look, Ritz, you weren't wrong. This clan gets into crazy trouble, and sometimes I can hardly believe I'm the leader, but if we ignored everything else, we wouldn't be any better than those predator clans we're always having to fight out of Sprohm and stuff. They're not clans, they're no better than bandits."

She gave him a witheringly unimpressed look. "So you're the good guys, looking out for little people, no job too small?"

"_Yes_," said Marche. "I know it sounds goofy, but it's how we've worked ever since the start, when I got us on a mission to go herb-picking. And it hasn't failed so far."

"…Fine," Ritz agreed. "So I'll stick around for now."

"No, you won't," Marche stated, again freezing her in mid-strike, but just with words. "Not the way you're acting. We can't just _deal_ with you, Ritz. You're just being annoying."

"I'm the best fencer your clan has ever seen!" she snarled.

"No argument here. But we saved the world, or fixed it, or at least did _something_ to it, without you, and we can keep going that way, too," he said.

"…Are you going to kick me out for not playing well with others?" Ritz asked.

"Aagh! You're impossible!" Marche growled. He began to stalk away, back toward the camp, but Ritz stopped him with a shout.

"Look, Marche, I'll do my job the way I know how, but you can't try to make me be who I'm not, and that's where we're going to run into trouble," Ritz insisted.

"…Whatever," said Marche, and kept going.

When he returned to camp, the fire was sending a wraithlike pillar of faint smoke, starred with sparks, up into the darkening dusk. Along with the uncommon trees, no other tower seemed appropriate in Aisenfield, a sea of green waves that rustled in the wind, just like the splash against a ship. Marche didn't much care for the actual sea, treacherously fluid thing that it was, and so found these plains all the more enjoyable for taking that and editing out the drowning bits.

Montblanc was getting firsthand experience with those drowning bits at that moment; Elena had warned him that a good-sized fish was probably strong enough to pull the moogle mage off his feet, but he had still been caught by surprise.

"This is really unkupo!" Montblanc shouted before he was dragged under the surface.

"I told you! Didn't I tell you? I know I did!" Elena grouched, shucking off her heavier boots and outer robes. "Can't you just let go of the rod?"

"I can't swim and my wings are wet!" Montblanc sputtered. "At least the pull is keeping me above the – _kpffh!_" He vanished again into the stream. It wasn't very deep, but moogles don't need a lot of depth to be in over their heads.

Elena dove in and slipped under the surface without much trouble, but for all her viera grace and years of swimming, she couldn't catch up with the weighed-down fish. Montblanc had stopped shouting, and she didn't know what to think of that, except that it would be best not to let him stay down there much longer. Hadn't anyone else heard him?

Then the reason for the moogle's quiet was apparently, at his sudden convulsion and bubble-obscured shout of "_Haste!_" Elena felt a surge of power and her speed doubled, easily closing the distance and snagging Montblanc by his shortcoat. She turned toward the surface and pushed off the bed of the stream, leaping from the water like a furry dolphin. She landed on the edge of the riverbank, with Montblanc crashing down just ahead of her, and the fish still thrashing mightily on the end of the line.

Fortunately, the impact that would have knocked the breath from his lungs instead pushed out the water Montblanc had breathed in, and he sputtered back to full consciousness. Before it could cause more trouble, Elena staked the fish down with her sword and it went still.

Montblanc nodded his thanks awkwardly at the dripping viera, and tried to start shaking himself dry. "Next time," Elena advised him, "just try Stop on the fish."

"Or Thundaga on the river," the moogle suggested weakly.

"Heh. Kupo," she agreed. As he wrung out his flexible boots, Montblanc paused and patted the ground hesitantly. "Yes, it's nicely solid again."

"…No, it really isn't," said Montblanc, as the sandy bank compressed under his hand. "Something's wrong with the sand…"

The ground next to them rose up and crumbled on a ridged protrusion, streaming dust and smudged with wet earth as it snapped and shook. An antlion burst through and pounced at Montblanc, who evaded by rolling frantically into the river again. Elena leapt on the giant insect from behind, slashing at it with her rapier, but its light blade could only make superficial scratches.

Screeching unnaturally, the attacking antlion leapt across the river and landed back first, grinding Elena between its ridges and the ground. With viera agility, Elena ignored the pain and bent like a horseshoe, hurling the monster off and giving her the leverage to get back on her feet.

She held her blade out in a guarding position, ready to hold off the antlion long enough for Montblanc to recover, if she couldn't kill the thing first. It easily righted itself, clicked its mandibles, and rushed her. Elena concentrated, calling Spirit magic to her. "_Shining Air!_" A ring of stars merged over her head, flew into the sky, and rocketed back down again as an ethereal golden shockwave that smashed the creature down to the ground. Unfortunately, from the murder in its eyes, she guessed it hadn't been blinded.

"Montblanc?" Elena called as she dodged the antlion's descending claws.

"_Huuuhh!_" The moogle flopped onto the bank and gasped again. "I'm… all right…"

"Great," the viera mused, looking on as Montblanc tried to get to his feet again. "Can't run, got to win before the giant bug eats the little… bat-rabbit sort of thing." She looked to the left. "Oh." Rapier and claws met at an appreciable fraction of the speed of sound.

The struggle went on for another minute or more before Montblanc thought the world had stopped being red and spinning enough for him to walk again. His staff was back at camp, but Montblanc had been studying magic longer than Marche had been learning the sword. Forget new Time spells. When you wanted to blow something up, Black magic was the way to go.

"_Fire!_" A little flaming bolt spiralled down and scorched the antlion, taking it by surprise and filling Elena with relief. A quick Swallowtail spin drove the beast away, leaving Montblanc a wider safe range of attack. "_Blizzara!_" A spire of ice slammed upward, engulfed the creature, and collapsed on it in a single crushing burst. It collapsed and began to dissolve with the usual speed of monsters.

"Thanks," Elena said, nodding. "Are we even now?"

"Sure, kupo," Montblanc agreed.

"Okay, then now you owe me," the viera stated, lifting the moogle onto her shoulders and taking off toward the camp again, pausing only long enough to pick up the fish with her sword.

As she had feared, they returned to a scene of minor chaos, as the remaining antlions of the swarm had burst from the ground and began shredding the little encampment. Wherever Leif focused his Flare, spheres of raging power blasted the creatures and broke their hard carapaces, allowing Matias clear and unhindered lance thrusts that brought them down quickly, while Marche and Ritz roamed the perimeter to take down the reinforcements.

Marche was as devastating as ever, but Ritz was racking up foes much more quickly than she could take them down. She was armed much as Elena was, being an elementalist, but she didn't have magic to back up her skilled bladework, and had to divide her focus too finely to turn the fight.

"Finish it up," Elena recommended, nudging Montblanc toward the bangaa and nu mou. "I'm going to take Marche's place."

"Got it," Montblanc said, and began the necessarily cautious aiming part of Thundaga.

Marche didn't have the spare breath to acknowledge Elena's arrival, but nodded at her before returning to the fray, casting antlions left and right with only a few mighty blows each. He had taken the mantle of a thief for a time, and used their curious skill-stealing power to gather an esoteric mix of the variable human abilities. A hunter's Sonic Boom to one side, the fighter's Beatdown straight ahead, and only a pair of the creatures remained.

Ritz was brilliant, as usual. She whirled through a Swallowtail strike as often as her more mundane attacks, having too many foes to duel in single combat. Too many reaching claws, too many gouging mandibles; she was injured and very, very slowly losing, but if nothing else it would be the greatest blaze of glory in a long time. Not that she had given up yet, as long as she had a–

…Oh. No, with that jawbreaker rising from the ground there, she didn't have an escape route. That would complicate things, but maybe the Swarmstrike poison could bring it down before one of them could – no, that wouldn't be happening either, as wickedly curved fangs dodged her busy blade and began to sink through her exhausted muscles…

A hand grabbed Ritz by her hauberk, yanked her out of the fray, and tossed her to strong reptilian arms. Marche knelt, drove his knightsword into the ground, and called out: "_Saint Cross!_" A radiant silver blast blew the clustered antlions away with holy might, while Leif and Montblanc's spells obliterated the jawbreaker.

"Ritz! Are you all right?" Marche called, dropping to her side, where Matias had lain the fencer down. Clutching at her ugly wound with one hand, Ritz opened her eyes to glared unfocusedly at Marche and held out the other hand expectantly. Leif obligingly supplied her with an x-potion, which she downed in a matter of seconds.

Ritz licked her dry lips, sarcastically savouring the flavourless concoction, and weakly decided "Ouch." The others smiled, except for Matias, who didn't want to scare anyone.

Marche looked at the rest of the group. "Long camp tonight. Watch shifts change every… two hours," he decided. "Except for Ritz."

"I can handle a watch shift," she protested, taking her hand away from the tear. "Look, I might still be bloody, but it's closed up and all."

"I know," Marche agreed. "Sitting very still all night is your reprimand for getting yourself into a suicidal battle."

"Yeah, 'cause you know I had _that_ all planned out," she murmured, rolling over and closing her eyes. "…Are those things poisonous? 'M feeling all lethargic…"

As Elena retrieved a blanket from Ritz's bag, Marche nodded to Leif. "I haven't snatched Esuna from anyone yet, so it's up to you to make sure."

"Yes, yes," the nu mou agreed. "Give me the first watch shift and I'll deal with any unpleasant pathogens."

"Are there," Matias wondered innocently, "ssuch thingss as pleasant pathogens?"

"…Bangaa should not make biology jokes," Leif stated firmly.

Since their camp had been less than fortified to start with, the four unoccupied clan members repaired the trampled tents, rebuilt the fire –Matias was all too eager to help with that task– and by the time the sky had faded through blue to the point of black, they were mostly asleep after a long day's march, with an ambush for dessert.

Only Marche lay awake at midnight, taking his watch shift. He stared up at stars, trying to remember if they were familiar or not, wondering if some part of him was back in St Ivalice now. Mewt's dream had ended, but Ivalice survived. Sometimes he thought he was home again, and yet sometimes it was clear that he wasn't.

Maybe he just didn't remember the other world. Maybe these were dreams and the other world was real, maybe he travelled in his sleep. It was more complicated that he wanted to think about, and his eyelids were getting heavy. Marche got uncertainly to his feet, nudged Elena to wakefulness, and silently walled himself into his hiking tent.

They didn't begin their march again until later than planned, having to recuperate from an abundance of hard-shelled, evil-minded creatures with too many legs, but Ritz had as much renewed spring in her step as could be expected of someone who thought the mission they were on was a waste of time. Their destination was clear at last; in the mid-distance Montblanc could see a single towering tree by a hilltop spring.

"There's some secret aspect to this mission you haven't mentioned yet, right?" Ritz asked.

"Right," Marche agreed.

"I knew it. So, what, the tree is carnivorous and has to be destroyed? It's home to a pack of chimaeras? It's the source of all life-giving mana and is in danger of withering into nothingness?"

"Mana?" Leif repeated. "No one told me about this!"

"Where on earth do humans get their ideas?" Elena wondered.

"We have to climb it," Marche said.

"…All of us?" Ritz wondered.

"No, just one will do the trick," Marche replied.

"…That's sort of anticlimactic," the fencer remarked.

"Well, since I didn't hire us, it's not my decision," the paladin countered.

"Fine," said Ritz. "I'll do it."

"You're still recovering," the naturally-acrobatic viera pointed out.

"Yeah, but I could use the stretching," she said. They were getting close, enough to see that this tree was entirely worthy of the label 'towering', and was, in fact, rather better at towering than most towers Marche had seen in the kingdom of Ivalice. Fortunately, the wind wasn't too strong that day, and the tree was sturdy enough not to waver much.

When they finally reached the tree's base, Ritz slipped off her pack and any other unnecessary accoutrements, though she kept her rapier close to hand and borrowed flexible bracers to make the job a little easier. She took the first ten feet by sheer righteous indignation at the thought that any plant life would defy her, and by the time gravity noticed, she was hanging onto the first branch.

The way was a bit slower from there, a step-by-step journey to each higher limb, and on a giant like this –oak, ash, spruce, Ritz had never been one for arboreal studies– they were rather sparse. Distantly, she hoped it wasn't a spruce, because she would be sure to hear some bizarre joke from Leif about sparse spruces when she got back down.

Of course, getting down would require her to get to the top to begin with, and that was far from over. Ten minutes after her feet left the ground, Ritz was barely close to halfway up. Just as she was wondering why no animals seemed to be living in what was essentially a naturally developed apartment complex, a bat with unconscionably long fangs swept down from above at her face.

A quick spin and forceful thrust took it down easily, but through her off-balance, and Ritz had to then embed the end of her blade in the trunk to keep from slipping off… into a long, long fall. She hadn't yet realised how high she was getting. A _long_ fall.

Some distance higher, she found a space where some ancient disaster, perhaps hurricane or thunderbolt, had scoured a side of the tree free of branches, and those that remained were thin and flimsy. Not to be deterred, Ritz carved her way up, one handhold at a time, until she reached the top, where the branches were close right up to the apex.

It had been more than half an hour when Ritz finally got to the tree's crown, baffled by what she could possibly have been sent there for. They had broken camp so late, with a long enough walk ahead, that the sun was well on its way down again, adding a new warmth of colour to the sky. Tied to the topmost branch was a little wooden mount with a golden plaque set into it. There were names on it, as well as an inscription, and one of them was that of their employer.

_Let this place never be forgotten, nor those who came here, nor what we learned here, east of the setting sun and west of the rising moon, where the earth has found a way to touch the sky._

Ritz wondered about it for a moment, then looked up to check. In the western sky, the radiant sun was mixing gold with blue, in the east was a two-thirds moon without the patience to wait for nightfall. They floated in the sky together, somehow both abnormal and natural, ordinary and miraculous, with the wide plains and hills extending further than Ritz could see in all directions, shot through with shining streams. The grass rippled everywhere in the breeze.

Such a vast world, that she was so high up and still couldn't see beyond the borders of Aisenfield. Something snapped together, like a tile into a mosaic that had been awkwardly lacking until then.

Not that she intended to give Marche the satisfaction. Ritz untied the plate and started her way back down again. She smiled, unable to help herself from thinking of it as south of both the sun and moon. It was a little easier on the way down, since leaving the tree was not so much a journey as a mission to _stop_ gravity from making it a fast, smooth trip.

With a last long drop and roll, Ritz was on the grass and solid ground again. She handed the little treasure over to Elena, who immediately read it and passed it on to the others. "You knew what it was, didn't you?" the fencer demanded amiably.

"I might have had an idea," Marche said.

"…Nah, no way," she decided. He laughed.

"No, I didn't know that, but I knew the guy who hired us a little better than you do."

"Not hard, since I don't know him," said Ritz. "And how about the rest of his clan?"

"They weren't a clan, just friends."

"Sure, sure. He's still making your point from last night."

"All I was talking about was taking all the jobs without worrying about glory–"

"Blah _blah_ blah blah," Ritz cut him off. "Yes, I got your point. Yes, there's a lot to be seen here, and yes, I'd rather have friends than not, especially _because_ there's so much to see. Yeah, I was able to get to the top alone, but it's not like I proved some important point by not needing help. And the view from up there was absolutely fantastic… which kind of means it ought to be shared."

"We can see the moon and sun all right from here." The paladin nodded back the way they had came. "Let's get going." Lief placed the inscribed plate into his pack, having already let Matias and Montblanc read it, and the group started on the road home again. "…You look really good in the Onlyone," Marche remarked.

"Well, we've got a lot in common," said Ritz.

"Oh, yeah," he agreed. "I mean, it's a stylish shirt capable of deflecting arrows, and you're… um…"

"I was being a little less subtle," she informed him.

"I think he made you leave behind the loner persona so he could flirt with you," said Montblanc.

"Confounded humanss," Matias grumbled.

"If only they weren't so ssstringy, eh?" Leif suggested, grinning oddly.

"Nu mou shouldn't make psycho carnivorous jokes," Elena stated.

Ritz pointed at their resident moogle, then Marche. "Montblanc had better not have been right about that."

Marche just sighed and rolled his eyes. "Welcome to the clan, Ritz."


End file.
